This solid milk chocolate bar was generously embedded with bits of caramelized almonds. Those nuts brought a slightly crystallized crunch to the texture of the snappy chocolate.

Those almonds had a toffee flavor from the caramelized sugar that they were toasted in and brought a strong roasted nuttiness. They paired well with the sweet milk chocolate, making this bar a crunchy, nutty, burnt-sugary, chocolately treat.

I think I would’ve liked this bar a bit more if it had been just a little less sweet. The milk chocolate had a hint of sour tinge and throat burn, but it was mild enough that I could get over it and focus on the great caramelized almond bits. An OM.

I’ve raved before about how Cost Plus World Market is a fantastic resource for new and unusual candies. I recently visited and found two Winter EditionRitter Sports by accident – they were shelved far away from the regular Ritter Sports and other chocolates.

In fact, they weren’t really shelved at all; I found them in some sort of remaking displays purgatory.

The Caramel-Orange had 16 squares of a milk chocolate sandwiching a golden brown caramel-orange ganache. The filling was thick and grainy and tasted of orange oil with a brown sugary finish. The citrus flavor was intensely fruity and orangey but without any tartness.

I found it a bit too sweet, and its finish took on a bit of a sour tinge. The milk chocolate was sweet as well, which only added to the sweetness of the overall treat.

I’m glad that I tried this, but the orange oil wasn’t enough to bring down the sweetness factor. An O.

The bar had a milk chocolate base, a generous layer of butterscotch sugar paste, and a topping of pecan quarters and halves. The butterscotch was the brown sugar and vanilla buttercream from their Butterscotch Square: a little grainy and super brown-sugar sweet.

See’s Butterscotch is the sweetest confection that I still love to eat. I think the brown sugar notes tone down the sweetness and keep it from becoming cloying.

The pecan bits were crunchy and nutty and did a great job balancing out the extreme sweetness of the butterscotch sugar. Finally, the milk chocolate base added a sweet milk chocolate flavor to the finish.

The chocolate was just an afterthought, though. It wasn’t super noticeable in the wake of all the other flavors going on.

The whole treat was like an extra decadent bar of pecan pie, only without crust. And let’s face it, crust just gets in the way of the good stuff. An OM.

The folks at CyberCandy heard my plea and sent me a free sample of my very own Cadbury Cola Pretzel Honeycomb bar. It was an absurdly ginormous bar, weighing in at 200g (just under half a pound).

The bar had traveled to me all the way from England, so it had broken up a bit by the time I got it. You can see from Kev’s review that the bar is pretty crazily/assymmetrically segmented, so that it looks quite cobblestonesque, and its underside was studded with oval chunks of pretzel.

Those pretzel chunks were each about peanut-sized, so pretty big. They delivered a great hit of salty crunch that contrasted nicely with the sweet and lightly grainy melt of the Cadbury milk chocolate.

While the bar had a hearty crunch from the pretzels, some chomps carried a more subtle, even dainty, crunch from the bits of honeycomb in the bar. They also added a lightly golden sweet tinge.

The cola came in the form of small chewy nuggets that were spread out throughout the bar. Those nuggets reminded me of Au’some Nuggets in texture – chewy with a matte graininess – and they added a fruity cola undertone.

I have to give Cadbury major credit for this “marvelous creation”. They really let their creativity run wild while still creating a tasty bar of unusual flavor combinations. It was almost too sweet for me, but those solid pretzel chunks reeled it back. An OM.

This Milka & Oreo came to me via a visiting German student in the lab. It was a gift for the lab to share, so I couldn’t take it home to photograph in my usual set-up.

Instead, I managed to snag some shots with my fancy new iPhone (finally gave up on my dumb phone when the 9 button no longer worked) before my labmates tucked into the bar. I gotta say, I think my new camera phone is at least as good as, if not better than, my now 5 years old digital camera.

The Milka & Oreo was a Milka milk chocolate bar filled with Oreo cookies and cream. That Milka chocolate was wonderful – there was just a thin top and bottom layer of it, but it was substantial in texture (thick and creamy) and flavor (luscious caramel notes).

The offwhite cream center was sweet with notes of dairy and vanilla frosting. It was chock full of hearty bits of Oreo chocolate cookies, which tasted of bittersweet dark cocoa.

Those cookies were incredibly crunchy. I was astounded as to how they maintained their crunchiness while surrounded by all that cream.

I found this bar to be quite addictive. The flavor and texture mix was great, with the melting and sweet caramel milk chocolate contrasting nicely with the robust crunch of the darker chocolate Oreos. An OM.

Instead, the chocolate bar within was just a plain rectangle, though its top was prettily wavy. The cross section wasn’t quite so chock full of nuts either.

The bar had a milk chocolate shell that was thickly creamy and quite sweet. Inside that shell was a top layer of dark chocolate truffle filling. While the truffle filling was also thick and creamy, it was softer and had a fatty feel as it melted.

Finally, there was some itty bitty pieces of pecans below the dark truffle filling. I found their taste to be on the raw side and would’ve preferred a roastier nut. Because I wanted more nuttiness from something that was supposed to feature pecans so prominently, an O.

The Cashew Meltaway had a minimalist silver wrapper with text but no pictures. Inside, the Cashew Meltaway bar looked pretty much like the Pecan Truffle – a rectangle with a wavy textured top.

Like the Pecan Truffle, this had a milk chocolate shell. Unlike the Pecan Truffle, however, the truffle filling inside the Cashew Meltaway was also milk chocolate.

I thought the truffled milk chocolate tasted more caramelly with some vanilla undertones as well. It was sweet and creamy, like the milk chocolate shell, but softer in texture.

The cashew bits were sharply crunchy and added a hint of nuttiness. I liked their nuttiness more than the under-flavored pecans.

Though this won points for being nuttier, it lost points for being too sweet after more than a couple of bites. After a while, it made my throat burn. An O.

While I was in Pittsburgh for a conference, my former labmate and awesome Pittsburgh host took me to one of the best grocery stores ever: the Giant Eagle flagship. It was at least as good, if not better, than the flagship Wegmans in Pittsford, largely due to its incredible candy selection.

I picked up a few local confections from Sarris Candies. First up, this S’mores treat, which was described as “marshmallow & graham cracker covered in our creamy milk chocolate”.

I was nervous about keeping this bar intact and unmelted throughout my travels. Thankfully, this was a hardy bar, and I unwrapped it at home to find it unscathed, with all its chocolate drizzle ribbons intact.

The outer milk chocolate shell was thick and sweet and creamy. It featured strong caramel undertones to its dairy chocolate flavor.

Inside, the 1.5 oz bar held a bottom layer of graham cracker topped with a white foamy marshmallow. The marshmallow was sweet and softly squishy, adding a nice textural contrast to the cookie and the melting chocolate.

The graham cracker cookie was quite crumbly and slightly crunchy. Its graham flavor was mildly sweet, which did a nice job of cutting the sweetness of the chocolate and keeping the treat from becoming too cloying.

I ate the whole thing in one sitting (rare for me!), partly because it wasn’t that big compared to regular candy bars. It gets an OM, and I wish I’d bought more. The Sarris website recommends microwaving these for a few seconds to make them extra gooey, which I’d like to try.

Note from Rosa: Here’s another guest post from expat friend Neil. He wrote this in May 2013 but only just now found the photos.

I try not to subject you to reviews of candy I’ve let expire, but I’m making an exception for this. January 2013 wasn’t that long ago, right…?

This came from a German supermarket in summer 2012. I was intrigued by the notion of passionfruit panna cotta and the all-caps dictation to “ENJOY COLD!”

I thought it’d be a bar. The eighteen individual chocolate squares surprised me. Each had a Lindt logo on top and the chocolate appeared milky, though maybe a bit dried out by the unintentional aging.

My experience with passionfruit is limited to candies and juice, so whether or not these taste of the fruit off the vine is up to a proper produce-eater. The chocolate is quite satisfactory, and the passionfruit aspect is what really shines.

There’s almost a bright, sparkling pop in your mouth a few seconds after you finish a square, which is all fruit. An OM.

Again, this bar was comprised of 15 rectangles, which came sealed in a silver wrapper tucked inside a cardboard box. This one was cutely decorated with a line drawing of a salt shaker.

The chocolate had a dry, smooth, velvet melt that felt comfortably matte on my tongue. Sprinkles of salt could be found throughout the bar, adding a bit of crunch along with a salty hit.

The chocolate had deep, dark earthy notes that occasionally found themselves set off with a hit of salt in a burst of sweet/sour/salty. The finish was intensely chocolatey and lingered pleasantly on the tongue.

I thought this would make for a great snacking bar. Simple but wonderfully chocolatey and kept interesting by the addition of salt – an OM.